Nancy P. Weis

The encaustic assemblages of Nancy P. Weis are not intended to be read literally or to explore any particular culture, but rather to look at anthropology and archaeology as metaphors for the discovery and recovery of inner meaning. “Physically in archaeology, and procedurally in other scholarship, we uncover information in small, unconnected bits, piece by piece, allowing one interesting fragment to lead us on a search for the next,” says Weis. “Often the connections and patterns we find in the various layers of information come as much from our need to organize ideas coherently as from documentable relationships among the objects or facts. Human beings classify things, assign meaning to them, and arrange them in ways that may or may not be decipherable by others, but which are universally recognizable as artificial forms of organization. Our fascination with mysterious fragments tells us as much about ourselves as about the cultures that produced them.” “The slate in Assessing Points of View came from my large collection of interesting pebbles, some of which are from Poultney, Vermont, some are from Castleton, Vermont, and others are from Aberystwyth in Wales. I have lost track of the exact provenance of each stone, so the slate in this piece could be from any of these places. # # # # #